Between the Assassinations

DAY FOUR: UMBRELLA STREET

If you wish to do some shopping while in Kittur, allow yourself a few hours to wander through Umbrella Street, the commercial center of town. Here you will find furniture stores, pharmacies, restaurants, sweet shops, and bookstores. (A few sellers of handmade wooden umbrellas can still be found here, although most have gone out of business because of cheap metal umbrellas imported from China.) The street houses Kittur’s most famous restaurant, the Ideal Traders Ice Cream and Fresh Fruit Juice Parlor, and also the office of the Dawn Herald, “Kittur’s only and finest newspaper.”

Every Thursday evening, an interesting event takes place in the Ramvittala Temple near Umbrella Street. Two traditional minstrels sit on the veranda of this temple and recite verses from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic of heroism and endurance, all through the night.

ALL THE EMPLOYEES of the furniture shop had gathered in a semicircle around Mr. Ganesh Pai’s desk. It was a special day: Mrs. Engineer had come to the shop in person. She had chosen her TV table, and now she was approaching Mr. Pai’s desk to finalize the deal.

His face was smeared with sandalwood, and he wore a loose-fitting silk shirt over which a dark triangle of his chest hair stuck out. On the wall behind his chair, he had hung gold tin foil images of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, and the fat elephant god Ganapati. An incense stick smoked below the images.

Mrs. Engineer sat down slowly at the desk. Mr. Pai reached into a drawer, and then held out four red cards to her. Mrs. Engineer paused, bit her lip, and snatched at one of the four cards.

“A set of stainless-steel cups!” Mr. Pai said, showing her the bonus card she had selected. “A truly wonderful gift, madam. Something you’ll treasure for years and years.”

Mrs. Engineer beamed. She took out a small red purse, counted off four one-hundred-rupee notes, and put them on the desk before Mr. Pai.

Mr. Pai, moistening the tip of his finger in a small bowl of water that he kept on his desk for just this purpose, counted the notes afresh; then he looked at Mrs. Engineer and smiled, as if expecting something more.

“The balance on delivery,” she said, getting up from her chair. “And don’t forget to send the bonus gift.”

“She may be the wife of the richest man in town, but she’s still a stingy old cunt,” Mr. Pai said, after he had seen her out of the store. An assistant laughed behind him. He turned and glared at the assistant-a small, dark Tamilian boy.

“Get one of the coolies to deliver it, quickly,” Mr. Pai said. “I want the balance before she forgets about it.”

The Tamilian boy ran out of the shop. The cycle-cart pullers were in their usual position-lying on their carts, staring into space, smoking beedis. Some of them were staring with dull avarice at the store on the other side of the road, the Ideal Traders Ice Cream Parlor; fat kids in T-shirts were licking vanilla cones outside the shop.

The boy stuck out his index finger and motioned to one of the men. “Chenayya-your number is up!”

Chenayya pedaled hard. He had been told to take the direct route to Rose Lane, so he had to go over Lighthouse Hill; he struggled to move the cart with the TV table, which was attached to his cycle. Once he was over the hump of the hill, he let the cycle glide. He slowed down in Rose Lane, found the house number, which he had memorized, and rang the bell.

He was expecting to see a servant, but when a plump, fair-skinned woman opened the door, he knew it was Mrs. Engineer herself.

Chenayya carried the TV table into the house, and put it down where she indicated.

He went out, and returned with a saw. He had walked in holding the thing close to his side, but when he got to the dining room, where he had left the table in two separate pieces, Mrs. Engineer watched as he held the tool at arm’s length, and suddenly it seemed enormous: eighteen inches long, with a serrated edge, rusty, but with patches of the original metal-gray color still showing through, like a sculpture of a shark made by a tribal artist.

Chenayya saw the anxiety in the woman’s eyes. To dispel her fear, he grinned ingratiatingly-it was the exaggerated, death-mask grin of a person not used to groveling-then he looked around as if to remind himself where he had left the table.

The legs were not of equal length. Chenayya closed an eye and examined the legs one by one; then he took the saw to each of the legs, creating a fine dust on the ground. He moved the saw so slowly, so precisely, that it seemed he was just rehearsing his actions; only the accumulation of wood dust on the ground was evidence to the contrary. He examined the four legs again with one eye closed to make sure they were even, and then dropped his saw. He searched the dirty white sarong he was wearing, which was the only garment on his body, for a relatively clean corner, and wiped down the table.

“The table is ready, madam.” He folded his hands and waited.

With an ingratiating smile, he wiped the table again, to make sure that the lady of the house had noticed the care he had taken with her furniture.

Mrs. Engineer had not been watching; she had retreated into an inner room. She returned and counted off seven hundred and forty-two rupees.

Hesitating a moment, she added three one-rupee notes to it.

“Give me something more, madam?” Chenayya blurted. “Give me three more rupees?”

“Six rupees? Nothing doing,” she said.

“It’s a long way, madam.” He picked up his saw, and gestured at his neck. “I had to carry it all that way, madam, on my cycle-cart. It hurts my neck very much.”

“Nothing doing. Get out-or I’ll call the police, you thug-get out, and take your big knife with you!”

As he walked out of the house, grumbling and sulking, he folded the money into a wad, then tied it into a knot on his loose dirty white sarong. A neem tree grew near the gate of the house, and he had to duck not to scrape his head against its branches. He had left the cycle-cart near the tree. He threw the saw into the cart. Around his cycle’s seat he had wrapped a white cotton cloth; he unfastened it and tied it around his head.

A cat went running past his leg; two dogs followed it in full flight. The cat leapt up the neem tree and bounded up the limbs; the dogs waited at the foot of the tree, scraping the base of the tree and barking. Chenayya, who had gotten onto his seat, lingered to watch the scene. The moment he started pedaling, he would no longer notice such things around him; he would turn into a pedaling machine that was headed straight back to his boss-man’s shop. He stood there, watching the animals, enjoying consciousness. He picked up a rotting banana skin, and left it draped on the leaves of the neem tree, so that it would startle the owners when they came out.

He was so pleased with himself for this that he smiled.

But he still did not want to start pedaling again, which was like handing over the keys of his personality to fatigue and routine.

About ten minutes later, he was on his cycle again, heading back to Umbrella Street. He was cycling, as always, with his butt elevated off the seat, his spine inclined at sixty degrees. Only at traffic intersections did he straighten himself, relax, and ease back onto the seat. The road, as he drew near Umbrella Street, was jammed once again; pushing his front wheel into the car ahead of him, Chenayya yelled:

“Son of a bitch, move!”

At last he saw to his right the sign GANESH PAI FAN AND FURNITURE STORE, and stopped his cycle.

Chenayya felt the money was burning a hole in his sarong; he wanted to hand it over to his employer as soon as possible. He wiped his palm against his sarong, pushed the door open, went into the store, and crouched by a corner of Mr. Pai’s table. Neither Mr. Pai nor the Tamilian assistant paid any attention to him. Untying the bundle in his sarong, he put his hands between his legs and stared at the floor.

His neck was hurting again; he moved it side to side to relieve the stress.

“Stop doing that.” Mr. Pai motioned for him to hand over the cash. Chenayya got up.

He moved slowly to the boss-man’s desk and handed the notes over to Mr. Ganesh Pai, who moistened his finger in the water bowl and counted off seven hundred and forty-two rupees. Chenayya stared at the water bowl; he noticed how its sides were scalloped to make them look like lotus petals, and how the artisan had even traced the pattern of a trellis around the bottom of the bowl.

Mr. Pai snapped his fingers. He had tied a rubber band around the notes, and was holding out his palm in Chenayya’s direction.

“Two rupees short.”

Chenayya undid the knot in the side of his sarong and handed over two one-rupee notes.

That was the sum he was expected to hand over to Mr. Pai at the end of every delivery; one rupee for the dinner he would be given at around nine o’clock, and one rupee for the privilege of having been chosen to work for Mr. Ganesh Pai.

Outside, the Tamilian boy from Mr. Pai’s shop was giving instructions to one of the cycle-cart pullers, a strong young fellow who had recently joined. He was about to start pedaling a cart with two cardboard boxes on it, and the boy from the store was saying, tapping the two boxes, “It’s a mixie in one box, and a four-blade fan in the other. When you take it to the house, you’ve got to make sure they both get plugged in before you return.” He told the cart puller the address he was to go to; then he made the coolie say it aloud, like a teacher with a slow pupil.

It would be some time before Chenayya’s number was called again, so he walked down the road to a spot where a man was sitting at a desk on the pavement, selling bundles of small rectangular tickets that were as colorful as pieces of candy. He smiled at Chenayya; his fingers began flipping through one of the bundles.

“Yellow?”

“First tell me if my number won last time,” Chenayya said. He brought out a dirty piece of paper from the knot on his sarong. The seller found a newspaper and glanced down to the bottom right-hand corner.

He read aloud, “Winning lottery numbers: 17-8-9-9-643- 455.”

Chenayya had learned enough about English numerals to know his own ticket number; he squinted for several moments, and then let the ticket float to the ground.

“People buy for fifteen, sixteen years before they win, Chenayya,” the lottery seller said, by way of consolation. “But in the end, those who believe always win. That is the way the world works.”

Chenayya hated it when the seller tried to console him like this; that was when he felt he was being ripped off by the men who printed the lottery tickets.

“I can’t go on this way forever,” he said. “My neck hurts. I can’t go on like this.”

The lottery seller nodded. “Another yellow?”

Tying the ticket into his bundle, Chenayya staggered back, then collapsed onto his cart. For a while he lay like that, not feeling refreshed from the rest, but only numb.

Then a finger tapped on his head.

“Number’s up, Chenayya.”

It was the Tamilian boy from the store.

To be delivered to 54 Suryanarayan Rao Lane. He repeated it aloud: “Fifty-four Suryanarayan…”

“Good.”

This route took him uphill over the Lighthouse Hill again. Riding his cycle-cart halfway up the hill, he alighted and began dragging the cycle-cart. His sinews bulged from his neck like webbing; and as he inhaled, the air burned through his chest and lungs. You can’t go on, said his tired limbs, his burning chest. You can’t go on. But at the same time, this was when his sense of resistance to his fate waxed greatest within him: and as he pushed, the restlessness and anger that had been within him all day became articulate at last:

You will not break me, motherfuckers! You will never break me!

If the thing to be delivered was light, like a mattress, he was not allowed to take a cycle-cart; it had to be carried on his head. This morning he was taking a mattress to the railway station. Repeating the address to the Tamilian boy from the shop, he set off with a slow, light step, like a fat man jogging. In a short while, the weight of the mattress seemed unbearable; it compressed his neck and spine and sent a shaft of pain down his back. He was virtually in a trance.

The client turned out to be a North Indian family that was leaving Kittur; the owner, as he had guessed beforehand (from his demeanor, his manner-you can tell which of these rich people have a sense of decency and which don’t), refused to pay him a tip.

Chenayya stood his ground. “You motherfucker! Give me my money!”

It was a triumph for him; the man relented and gave him three rupees. On the way out of the station, he thought, I feel elated, but my customer has done no more than pay me what he owes me. This is what my life has been reduced to.

The odors and the noise of the train station made him feel sick. He squatted down by the tracks, pulled his sarong up, and held his breath. As he was squatting there, the train roared by. He turned around; he wanted to shit into the faces of the people on the train. Yes, that would be good; as the train thundered over the tracks, he would force out the turds into the faces of the passersby.

Next to him, he saw a pig, which was doing that very thing.

At once, he thought, God, what am I becoming? He walked to a corner, crawled behind a bush, and defecated there. He told himself, I will never again defecate like this, in a place where I can be seen. There is a difference between man and animal; there is a difference.

He closed his eyes.

The scent of basil from near him seemed like evidence that there were good things in the world. But when he opened his eyes, the earth around him was one of thorns and shit and stray animals.

He looked up and took a deep breath. The sky is clean, he thought. There is purity up there. He tore off a few leaves, wiped himself clean with them, then rubbed his left hand against the earth in a bid to neutralize the smell.

At two o’clock, he got his next number: the delivery of a giant stack of boxes to an address in Valencia. The Tamilian boy made sure he understood the address exactly: beyond the hospital, and down by the seminary where the Jesuit priests stayed.

“There’s a lot of work today, Chenayya,” he said. “Make sure you go the quick way-over the Lighthouse Hill.”

Chenayya grunted, shifted his weight onto the pedals, and was on his way. The rusty iron chain that double-locked the cart to the front wheels of the bicycle began to make noise as he cycled.

Down the main road, he was stuck in a traffic jam. He stopped, and became aware of his body once again. His neck hurt; the sun seared his back. Once he was conscious of pain, he began to think.

Why were some mornings difficult, some mornings simple? The other cart pullers never had “good” or “bad” days; they just did their work like machines. Only he had his moods. He looked down, to relieve his painful neck, and stared at the rusty chain by his feet, wound around the metal rod that joined the cycle to the cart. Time to oil the chain, he told himself. Must not forget.

Uphill again. Leaning forward out of his seat, Chenayya was straining hard; the breath entered his lungs like a hot poker. Halfway up the hill, he saw an elephant walking down toward him with a small bundle of leaves on its back, and a mahout poking its ear with an iron rod.

He stopped; this was unbelievable. He began to shout at the elephant: “Hey, you, what are you doing with those leaves-take this load from me! It’s more your size, motherfucker!”

Cars honked behind him. The mahout turned and gesticulated at him with his iron rod. A passerby yelled at him not to obstruct the traffic.

“Don’t you see that something is wrong with this world?” he said, turning around to the driver of the car behind him, who was jabbing at his horn with the fleshy part of his palm. “When an elephant gets to lounge downhill doing virtually no work at all, and a human being has to pull such a heavy cart?”

The cars honked, and the cacophony grew.

“Don’t you see something is wrong here?” he shouted. They honked back. The world was furious at his fury. It wanted him to move out of its way; but he was enjoying being exactly where he was, blocking all these rich and important people.

That evening there were great streaks of pink in the sky. After the shop closed, the coolies moved to the alley behind the store; they took turns buying small bottles of country liquor, which they shared among themselves, getting giddy and belting out off-key Kannada film songs.

Chenayya never joined them. “You’re wasting your money, you idiots!” he sometimes shouted at them; they simply jeered back.

He would not drink; he had promised himself he would not squander the hard-earned fruits of his labor on alcohol. Yet the smell of liquor in the air made his mouth water; the good humor and bonhomie of the other cart pullers made him lonely. He closed his eyes. A tinkling noise made him open them.

Nearby, on the steps of an unused building, as was usual, a fat prostitute had emerged to ply her trade. She clapped her hands and advertised her presence by striking two coins together. A customer came up; they began haggling over a price. The deal was not concluded, and the man left, cursing.

Chenayya, lying in his cart with his feet sticking out, watched the action with a dull grin.

“Hey, Kamala!” he shouted at the prostitute. “Why not give me a chance this evening?”

She turned her face from him and kept clinking the coins together. He stared at her plump breasts, at the dark tip of her cleavage that showed through the blouse, at her garishly painted lips.

He turned his eyes to the sky: he had to stop thinking of sex. Streaks of pink amid the clouds. Isn’t there a God, or someone there, Chenayya wondered, watching down on this earth? One evening, at the train station to deliver a parcel, he had heard a wild Muslim dervish talking in a corner of the station about the Mahdi, the last of the imams, who would come for this earth and give the evil their due. “Allah is the Maker of all men,” the dervish had mumbled. “The poor and the rich alike. And he observes our hurt, and when we suffer, He suffers with us. And He will send, at the End of the Days, the Mahdi, on a white horse with a sword of fire, to put the rich in their place and correct all that is wrong with the world.”

A few days later, when Chenayya went to a mosque, he found that Muslims stank, so he did not stay there long. Yet he had never forgotten about the Mahdi; each time he saw a streak of pink in the sky, he thought he could detect some God of Fairness watching over the earth and glowering with anger.

Chenayya closed his eyes, and heard again the tinkling of coins. He turned about restlessly, and then covered his face in a rag so the sun wouldn’t sting him awake and went to sleep. Half an hour later, he woke up with a sharp pain in his ribs. A policeman jabbed his lathi into the bodies of the cart pullers. A truck was entering this part of the market. All you cycle-cart pullers! Get up and move your carts!

The kite-flying contest took place between two nearby houses. The owners of the kites were hidden; all Chenayya saw, as he brushed his teeth with a stick of neem, were the black and red kites fighting each other in the sky. As always the kid with the black kite was winning; he was flying his kite the highest. Chenayya wondered about the poor kid with the red kite; why couldn’t he ever win?

He spat, and then walked a few feet so he could urinate onto the side of a wall.

Behind him he heard jeers. The other pullers were urinating right where they had slept.

He said nothing to them. Chenayya never talked to his fellow cart pullers. He could barely stand the sight of them-the way they bent and groveled to Mr. Ganesh Pai; yes, he might do the same, but he was furious, he was angry inside. These other fellows seemed incapable of even thinking badly of their employer; and he could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion.

When the Tamilian boy brought out the tea, he reluctantly rejoined the pullers; he heard them talking once again, as they did just about every morning, about the autorickshaws they were going to buy once they got out of here, or the small tea shop they were going to open.

Think about it, he wanted to tell them, just think about it.

Mr. Ganesh Pai allowed them just two rupees for each trip; meaning that, at the rate of three trips a day, they were making six rupees; once you deducted for lotteries and liquor, you were lucky to save two rupees; Sundays were off, as were Hindu holidays, so at the month’s end, they saved forty or forty-five rupees only. A trip to the village, an evening with a whore, an extralong drinking binge, and your whole month’s savings were dust. Assuming you saved everything you could, you were lucky to earn four hundred a year. An autorickshaw would cost twelve, fourteen thousand. A small tea shop four times as much. That meant thirty, thirty-five years of such work before they could do anything else. But did they think their bodies would last that long? Did they find a single cart puller above the age of forty around them?

Don’t you ever think about such things, you baboons?

Yet whenever he had tried to get them to understand this, they had refused to demand for more collectively. They thought they were lucky; thousands would take their jobs at a moment’s notice. He knew they were right too.

Despite their logic, despite their valid fears, their sheer spinelessness grated on him. That was why, he thought, Mr. Ganesh Pai could be confident that a customer could hand over to a cart puller thousands of rupees in cash, and know that it would all come to him, every last rupee, without the cart puller taking a note of it.

Naturally, Chenayya had long planned on stealing the money that a customer gave him one day. He would take the money and leave the town. This much he was certain he would do-someday very soon.

That evening, the men were huddled around. A man in a blue safari suit, an important, educated man, was asking them questions; he had a small notepad in his hands. He said he had come from Madras.

He had asked the cart pullers for their ages. No one was sure. When he said, “Can you make a rough guess?” they simply nodded. When he said, “Are you eighteen, or twenty, or thirty-you must have some idea,” they simply nodded again.

“I’m twenty-nine,” Chenayya called out from his cart.

The man nodded. He wrote something down in his notepad.

“Tell me, who are you?” Chenayya asked. “Why are you asking us all these questions?”

He said he was a journalist, and the cart pullers were impressed; he worked for an English-language newspaper in Madras, and that impressed them even more.

They were amazed that a smartly dressed man was talking to them with courtesy, and they begged him to sit down on a cot, which one of them wiped clean with the side of his palm. The man from Madras pulled at the knees of his trousers and sat down.

Then he wanted to know what they were eating. He made a list of everything they ate every day in his notepad; then he went silent and scratched a lot on the pad with his pen, while they waited expectantly.

At the end, he put the notepad down, and, with a wide, almost triumphant grin, he declared:

“The work you are doing exceeds the amount of calories you consume. Every day, every trip you take-you are slowly killing yourselves.”

He held his notepad, with its squiggles and zigzags and numbers, as proof of his claim.

“Why don’t you do something else, like work in a factory-or anything else? Why don’t you learn to read and write?”

Chenayya jumped off his cycle.

“Don’t patronize us, you son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Those who are born poor in this country are fated to die poor. There is no hope for us, and no need of pity. Certainly not from you, who have never lifted a hand to help us; I spit on you. I spit on your newspaper. Nothing ever changes. Nothing will ever change. Look at me.” He held out his palms. “I am twenty-nine years old. I am already bent and twisted like this. If I live to forty, what is my fate? To be a twisted black rod of a man. You think I don’t know this? You think I need your notepad and your English to tell me this? You keep us like this, you people from the cities, you rich fucks. It is in your interest to treat us like cattle! You fuck! You English-speaking fuck!”

The man put away his notepad. He looked at the ground, and seemed to be groping for a response.

Chenayya felt a tapping on his shoulder. It was the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

“Stop talking so much! Your number has come up!”

Some of the other cart pullers began chuckling, as if to say to Chenayya, Serves you right.

You see! He glared at the English-speaker from Madras as if to say, Even the privilege of speech is not ours. Even if we raise our voices, we are told to shut up.

Strangely, the man from Madras was not grinning; he had turned his face away, as if he were ashamed.

As he went up Lighthouse Hill that day, as he forced his cart over the hump, he felt none of his usual exultation. I am not really moving forward, he thought. Every turn of the wheel undid him and slowed him down. Each time he cycled, he was working the wheel of life backward, crushing muscle and fiber into the pulp from which they were made in his mother’s womb; he was unmaking himself.

All at once, right in the middle of traffic, he stopped and got off his cart, possessed by the simple and clear thought, I can’t go on like this.

Why don’t you do something, work in a factory, anything, to improve yourself?

After all, for years you have delivered things to the gates of factories-it is just a question of getting inside.

The next day, he went to the factory. He saw thousands of men reporting for work, and he thought, What a fool I have been, never even to try and get work here.

He sat down, and none of the guards asked any questions, thinking he was waiting to collect a delivery.

He waited till noon, and then a man came out. From the number of people following him, Chenayya thought he must be the big man. He went running past the guards and got down on his knees:

“Sir! I want to work.”

The man stared at him. The guards came running up to drag Chenayya back, but the big man said:

“I have two thousand workers, and not one of them wants to work, and here is this man, down on his knees, begging for work. That’s the attitude we need to move this country forward.”

He pointed at Chenayya. “You won’t get offered any long-term contract. Understand? Day by day.”

“Anything, anything you want.”

“What kind of work can you do?”

“Anything, anything you want.”

“All right, come back tomorrow. We don’t need a coolie right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The big man took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Hear what this man has to say,” he said, as a group of other men, who were also smoking, gathered around him.

And Chenayya repeated that he would do anything, under any conditions, for any sort of pay.

“Say it again!” the big man ordered, and another group of men came up and listened to Chenayya.

That evening, he came back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop and shouted at the other workers, “I’ve found a real job, you motherfuckers. I’m out of here.”

The Tamilian boy alone cautioned him. “Chenayya, why don’t you wait a day and make sure the other job is good? Then you can quit here.”

“Nothing doing, I quit!” he yelled, and walked away.

The next day at dawn, he was back at the factory gate. “I want to see the big man,” he said, shaking the bars of the gate for attention. “He told me to come today.”

The guard, who was reading the newspaper, looked up at him fiercely. “Get out!”

“Don’t you remember me? I came-”

“Get out!”

He waited near the gate; after an hour it opened, and a car with tinted windows pulled out. Running side by side with the car, he banged on the windows. “Sir! Sir! Sir!” A dozen hands seized him from behind; he was shoved to the ground and kicked.

When Chenayya wandered back to Mr. Pai’s shop that evening, the Tamilian boy was waiting for him. He said, “I never told the boss you quit.”

The other cart pullers did not tease Chenayya that night. One of them left him a bottle of liquor, still half full.

The rain fell without pause. He rode his cycle through the downpour, splashing down the road. He wore a long white plastic sheet over his body like a shroud; a black cloth tied it around his head, giving it the look of an Arab’s cape and caftan.

This was the most dangerous time for the coolies. Wherever the road was broken up into a pothole, he had to slow down to avoid tipping his cycle-cart over.

Waiting at the traffic intersection, he saw to his left a fat kid sitting on the seat of an autorickshaw. The rain made him playful; he stuck out his tongue at the fellow. The boy did likewise, and the game went on for several turns, until the autorickshaw driver chided the boy and glared at Chenayya.

The pain in his neck began biting again. I can’t go on like this, he thought.

From across the road, one of the other cart pullers, a young boy, drove his cart alongside Chenayya’s. “Have to deliver this fast and get back,” he said. “Boss said he’s depending on me to be back within an hour.” He grinned, and Chenayya wanted to shove his fist into the grin. God, how full of suckers the world is, he thought, counting to ten to calm himself. How happy this boy seemed to be, to destroy himself with overwork. You baboon! he wanted to shout. You and all the others! Baboons!

He put his head down, and suddenly it seemed a great strain to move the cart.

“You’ve got no air in one tire!” the baboon shouted. “You’ll have to stop!” He grinned and rode on.

Stop? Chenayya thought. No, that is what a baboon would do: not me. Putting his head down, he pedaled on, forcing his flat tire along:

Move!

And slowly and noisily, rattling its old wheels and its unoiled chains, the cart moved.

It’s raining now, Chenayya thought, lying in his cart that night, a plastic sheet over him to protect him from the rain. That means half the year is over. It must be June or July. I must be nearly thirty now.

He pulled the sheet down, and lifted his head to relieve the pain in his neck. He could not believe his eyes: even in this rain, some motherfucker was flying a kite! It was the kid with the black kite. As if taunting the heavens, the lightning, to come strike him. Chenayya watched, and forgot his pain.

In the morning, two men in khaki uniforms came into the alley: autorickshaw drivers. They had come to wash their hands in the tap at the end of the alley. The cart pullers instinctively moved to the side and let the two men in uniforms through. As they washed their hands, Chenayya heard them talk about an autorickshaw driver who had been locked up by the police for hitting a customer.

“Why not?” one autorickshaw driver said to the other. “He had every right to hit that man! I only wish he had gone further, and killed that bastard before the police got to him!”

After brushing his teeth, Chenayya went to the lottery seller. A boy, a total stranger, was sitting at the desk, kicking his legs merrily.

“What happened to the old fellow?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone into politics.”

The boy described what had happened to the old seller. He had joined the campaign of a BJP candidate for the Corporation elections. His candidate was likely to win in the elections. Then he would sit on the veranda of the candidate’s house; if you wanted to see the politician, you would have to pay the old seller fifty rupees first.

“That’s the politician’s life-it’s the fastest way to get rich,” the boy said. He flipped through his colored paper pieces. “What’ll you have, uncle? A yellow? Or a green?”

Chenayya turned away without buying any of the colored tickets.

Why, he thought that night, can’t that be me-the fellow who goes into politics to get rich? He did not want to forget what he had just heard, so he pinched himself sharply at the ankle.

It was Sunday again. His free day. Chenayya woke up when it got too hot, then brushed his teeth lazily, looking up to see if kites were flying in the sky. The other pullers were going to see the new Hoyka temple that the member of Parliament had opened, just for Hoykas, with their own Hoyka deity and Hoyka priests.

“Aren’t you coming, Chenayya?” the others shouted to him.

“What has any god ever done for me?” he shouted back; they giggled at his recklessness.

Baboons, he thought, as he lay down in the cart again. Going to worship some statue in a temple, thinking it’ll make them rich.

Baboons!

He lay with one arm over his face; then he heard the tinkling of coins.

“Come over, Kamala,” he called out to the prostitute, who was in her usual spot, playing with the coins. When he taunted her for the sixth time, she snapped:

“Get lost, or I’ll call Brother.”

At this reference to the kingpin who ran the brothels in this part of town, Chenayya sighed and turned over in his cart.

He thought, Perhaps it is time for me to get married.

He had lost contact with all his relatives; plus he did not actually want to get married. Bring children-into what future? That was the most baboonlike thing the other coolies did: procreate, as if to say they were satisfied with their fate, they were happy to replenish the world that had consigned them to this task.

There was nothing in him but anger, and if he married he thought he would lose his anger.

As he turned around in his cart, he noticed a welt on his foot. He frowned, trying hard to remember how he had gotten it.

The next morning, returning from a delivery, he made a diversion and rode his cart to the office of the Congress Party on Umbrella Street. He crouched on the veranda of the office and waited for someone important-looking to come out.

A sign outside showed Indira Gandhi raising her hand, with the slogan: MOTHER INDIRA WILL PROTECT THE POOR. He smirked.

Were they completely nuts? Did they really think that anyone would believe a politician would protect the poor?

But then he thought, Maybe this woman, Indira Gandhi, had been someone special; maybe they were right. In the end, she was shot dead, wasn’t she? That seemed evidence to him that she had wanted to help people. Suddenly it seemed that the world did have good-hearted men and women-he felt he had cut himself off from all of them by his bitterness. Now he wished he hadn’t been so rude to that journalist from Madras…

A man in loose white clothes appeared, followed by two or three hangers-on; Chenayya rushed up to him and got down on his knees with his palms folded.

All the following week, whenever he knew his number was not going to be called for a while, he rode around on his cycle, sticking up posters of the Congress candidates in all the Muslim-dominated streets, shouting, “Vote for Congress-the party of Muslims! Defeat the BJP!”

The week passed. The elections took place, the results were declared. Chenayya rode his cycle to the Congress Party office, parked it outside, went to the doorkeeper, and asked to see the candidate.

“He’s a busy man now; just wait out here a moment,” said the doorkeeper. He placed a hand on Chenayya’s back. “You really helped us do well in the Bunder, Chenayya. The BJP defeated us everywhere else, but you got the Muslims to vote for us!”

Chenayya beamed. He waited outside the party headquarters, and watched the cars arrive and disgorge rich and important men, who hurried in to see the candidate. He saw them and thought, This is where I will wait to collect money from the rich. Not much. Just five rupees from everyone who comes to see the candidate. That should do.

His heart beat from excitement. An hour passed.

Chenayya decided to go into the waiting room, to make sure that he too got to see the man when he finally emerged. There were benches and stools in the waiting room; a dozen other men were waiting. Chenayya saw an empty chair and wondered if he should sit down. Why not, had he not worked for the victory too? He was about to sit down when the doorkeeper said:

“Use the floor, Chenayya.”

Another hour passed. Everyone in the waiting room was told to go in and see the big man; but Chenayya was still squatting outside, his face between his palms, waiting.

Finally, the doorkeeper came up to him with a box full of round yellow sweets. “Take one.”

Chenayya took a sweet, almost put it in his mouth, and then put it back. “I don’t want a sweet.” His voice rose quickly. “I hung posters all over this town! Now I want to see the big man! I want to get a job with-”

The doorkeeper slapped him.

I am the biggest fool here, Chenayya thought, back at his alley; the other pullers were lying in their carts, snoring hard. It was late that night, and he was the only one who could not sleep. I am the biggest fool; I am the biggest baboon here.

On the way to his first assignment the next morning, there was another traffic jam on Umbrella Street -the biggest one he had ever seen.

He slowed down, spitting on the road every few minutes to help himself pass the time.

When he finally got to his destination, he found that he was delivering to a foreign man. The man insisted on helping Chenayya unload the furniture, which confused Chenayya terribly. The whole time, the foreigner spoke to Chenayya in English, as if he expected everyone in Kittur to be familiar with the language.

He held his hand out at the end to shake Chenayya’s hand, and gave him a fifty-rupee note.

Chenayya was in a panic-where was he expected to get change? He tried to explain, but the European just grinned and shut the door.

Then he understood. He bowed deeply to the closed door.

When he returned to the alley with two bottles of liquor, the other cart pullers stared at him.

“Where did you get money for that from, Chenayya?”

“None of your business.”

He drank a bottle dry; then drank the second. Then he went over to the liquor shop and bought another bottle of hooch; when he woke next morning he realized he had spent all his money on liquor.

All of it.

He put his face in his hands and began to cry.

On an assignment to the train station, he went to the tap to drink; nearby, he overheard autorickshaw drivers talking about that driver who had hit his customer.

“A man has a right to do what he has to do,” one said. “The condition of the poor is becoming intolerable here.”

But they were not poor themselves, Chenayya thought, slathering his dry forearm with water; they lived in houses, they owned their vehicles. You have to attain a certain level of richness before you can complain about being poor, he thought. When you are this poor, you are not given the right to complain.

“Look-that’s what the rich of this town want to turn us into!” the autorickshaw man said, and Chenayya realized that he was being pointed at. “They want to swindle us out of our money until we turn into that!”

He cycled out of the train station, but he could not stop hearing those words. He could not switch off his mind. Like a tap it dripped. Think, think, think. He passed by a statue of Gandhi, and he began thinking again. Gandhi dressed like a poor man-he dressed like Chenayya did. But what did Gandhi do for the poor?

Did Gandhi even exist? he wondered. These things- India, the River Ganges, the world beyond India -were they even real?

How would he ever know?

Only one group was lower than he was. The beggars. One misstep, and he would be down with them, he thought. One accident. And that would be him. How did the others deal with this? They did not. They preferred not to think.

When he stopped at an intersection that night, an old beggar put his hands in front of Chenayya.

He turned his face away, and went down the road back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

The following morning, he was going over the hill again, with five cardboard crates piled up one above the other in his cart, thinking:

Because we let them. Because we do not dare run away with that wad of fifty thousand rupees-because we know other poor people will catch us and drag us back before the rich man. We poor have built the prison around ourselves.

In the evening, he lay down exhausted. The others had built a fire. Someone would come and give him some rice. He was the hardest worker, so the boss-man had let it be known that he ought to be fed regularly.

He saw two dogs humping. There was no passion in what they were doing: it was just a release. That is all I want to do right now, he thought. Hump something. But instead of humping, I have to lie here, thinking.

The fat prostitute sat outside. “Let me come up,” he said. She did not look at him; she shook her head.

“Just one time. I’ll pay you next time.”

“Get out of here, or I’ll call Brother,” she said. He gave in; he bought a small bottle of liquor, and he began drinking.

Why do I think so much? These thoughts are like thorns inside my head; I want them out. And even when I drink, they’re there. I wake up in the night, my throat burning, and I find all the thoughts still in my head.

He lay awake in his cart. He was sure he had been hounded by the rich even in his dreams, because he woke up furious and sweating. Then he heard the noise of coitus nearby. Looking around, he saw another cart puller humping the prostitute. Right next to him. He wondered, Why not me? Why not me? He knew the fellow had no money; so she was doing it out of charity. Why not me?

Every sigh, every groan of the coupling pair was like a chastisement; and Chenayya couldn’t take it anymore.

He got off his cart, walked around till he found a puddle of cow dung on the ground, and scooped a handful. He flung the shit at the lovers. There was a cry; he rushed up to them, and dabbed the whore’s face with shit. He put his shit-smeared fingers into her mouth, and kept them there, even though she bit them; the harder she bit, the more he enjoyed it, and he kept his fingers there until the other pullers descended on him and dragged him away.

One day he was given an assignment that took him right out of the city limits, into Bajpe; he was delivering a doorframe to a construction site.

“There used to be a big forest here,” one of the construction workers told him. “But now that’s all that’s left.” He pointed to a distant clump of green.

Chenayya looked at the man and asked, “Is there any work here for me?”

On his way back, he took a detour off the road and went to the patch of green. When he got there, he left his bike and walked around; seeing a high rock, he climbed up and looked at the trees around him. He was hungry, because he had not eaten all day, but he felt all right. Yes, he could live out here. If only he had a little food, what more would he want? His aching muscles could be rested. He lay back on the rock and looked at the sky.

He dreamed of his mother. Then he remembered the thrill with which he had come to Kittur from his village, at the age of seventeen. That first day, he was taken around by a female cousin, who pointed out some of the main sights to him, and he remembered the whiteness of her skin, which doubled the charms of the city. He never saw that cousin again. He remembered what came next: the terrible contraction, the life that got smaller and smaller by the day in the city. The realization came to him now that the first day in a city was destined to be the best: you had already been expelled from paradise the moment you walked into the city.

He thought, I could be a sanyasi. Just eat bushes and herbs and live with the sunrise and sunset. The wind picked up; the trees nearby rustled, as if they were chuckling at him.

It was nighttime when he cycled back. To get to the shop faster, he took the route down the Lighthouse Hill.

As he was coming down, he saw a red light and then a green light attached to the back of a large silhouette moving down the road; a moment later he realized it was an elephant.

It was the same elephant he had seen earlier; only now it had red-and-green traffic lights tied with string to its rump.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he shouted to the mahout.

The mahout shouted back, “Well, I have to make sure no one bumps into us from behind at night-there are no lights anywhere!”

Chenayya threw his head up and laughed; it was the funniest thing he had ever seen: an elephant with traffic lights on its rump.

“They didn’t pay me,” the mahout said. He had tied the beast to the side of the road, and was chatting with Chenayya. He had some peanuts, and he didn’t want to eat them alone, so he was glad to share a few with Chenayya.

“They made me take their kid on a ride, and they didn’t pay me. You should have seen them drink and drink. And they wouldn’t pay me fifty rupees, which was all I asked for.”

The mahout slapped the side of his elephant. “After all that Rani did for them.”

“That’s the way of the world,” Chenayya said.

“Then it’s a rotten world.” The mahout chewed a few more peanuts.

“A rotten world.” He slapped the side of his elephant. Chenayya looked up at the beast.

The behemoth’s eyes gazed sidelong at him; they glistened darkly, almost as if they were tearing. The beast also seemed to be saying, Things should not be this way.

The mahout pissed against a wall, turning his head up, arching his back, and exhaling in relief, as if it were the happiest thing he had done all day.

Chenayya kept looking at the elephant, its sad wet eyes. He thought, I am sorry I ever cursed you, brother. He spoke gently to it as he rubbed its trunk.

The mahout stood at the wall, watching Chenayya talking to the elephant, a sense of apprehension rising within him.

Outside the ice-cream shop, two kids were licking ice-cream bars and staring right at Chenayya. He lay sprawled on his cart, dead tired after another day’s work.

Don’t you see me? Chenayya wanted to shout out over the traffic. His stomach was grumbling; he was tired and hungry, and there was still an hour before the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop would come out with dinner.

One of the kids across the street turned away, as if the fury in the cart puller’s eyes had become tangible; but the other one, a fat light-skinned fellow, stayed put, licking his tongue up and down his ice-cream stick, staring nonchalantly at Chenayya.

Don’t you have any shame, any sense of decency, you fat fuck?

He turned around in his cart, and began talking aloud to calm his nerves. His gaze fell on the rusty saw lying at the end of his cart. “What stops me now,” he said aloud, “from crossing the street and slashing that boy into shreds?”

Just the thought made him feel powerful.

A finger began tapping on his shoulder. If it is the fat motherfucker with his ice-cream bar, I will pick up that saw and slice him in two, I swear to God.

It was the Tamilian assistant from the store.

“Your turn, Chenayya.”

He took his cart to the entrance of the store, where the boy handed him a small package wrapped in newspaper and tied in white string.

“It’s to the same place you went a while back to deliver the TV table to. Mrs. Engineer’s house. We forgot to send the bonus gift, and she’s been complaining.”

“Oh, no,” he groaned. “She doesn’t tip at all. She’s a complete cunt.”

“You have to go, Chenayya. Your number came up.”

He cycled there slowly. At every intersection and traffic light he looked at the saw in his cart.

Mrs. Engineer opened her door herself: she said she was on the phone, and told him to wait outside.

“The food at the Lions Club is so fattening,” he heard her saying. “I’ve put on ten kilos in the past year.”

He looked around quickly. No lights were on in the neighbors’ houses. There seemed to be a night watchman’s shed at the back of the house, but that too was dark.

He snatched the saw and went in. She had her back to him; he saw the whiteness of her flesh in the gap between her blouse and her skirt; he smelled the perfume of her body. He went closer.

She turned around, then covered the receiver with her hand. “Not in here, you idiot! Just put it on the floor and get out!”

He stood there, confused.

“On the floor!” she screamed at him. “Then get out!”

He nodded, and dropped the saw on the floor and ran out.

“Hey! Don’t leave that in here! Oh, my God!”

He ran back, picked up the saw, then left the house, ducking low to avoid the neem-tree leaves. He tossed the saw into the cart: a loud clatter. The bonus gift…where was it? He grabbed the package, ran into the house, left it somewhere, and slammed the door.

There was a startled meow. A cat was sitting up on a branch of the tree, watching him closely. He went close to it. How beautiful its eyes were, he thought. Like a jewel that had fallen off the throne, a hint of a world of beauty beyond his knowledge and reach. He reached up to it, and it came to him.

“Kitty, kitty,” he said, stroking its fur. It wriggled in his arms, restless already.

Somewhere, I hope, a poor man will strike a blow against the world. Because there is no God watching over us. There is no one coming to release us from the jail in which we have locked ourselves.

He wanted to tell all this to the cat; maybe it could tell it to another cart puller-the one who would be brave enough to strike the blow.

He sat down by the wall, still holding on to the cat and stroking its fur. Maybe I can take you along, kitty. But how would he feed it? Who would take care of it when he was not around? He released it. He sat with his back to the wall and watched it walking cautiously up to a car and then slink under it; he craned his neck to see what it was doing down there when he heard a shout from above. It was Mrs. Engineer, yelling at him from a window at the top of her mansion:

“I know what you’re up to, you thug-I can read your mind! You won’t get another rupee out of me! Get moving!”

He was no longer angry; and he knew she was right. He had to go back to the store. His number would come up again soon. He got on his cart and pedaled.

There was a traffic jam in the city center, and Chenayya had to go over the Lighthouse Hill again. Traffic was bad here too. It moved a few inches at a time, and then Chenayya had to stop mid-hill, and clamp his foot down on the road to hold his cart in its place. When the horns began to sound, he rose from his seat and pedaled; behind him, a long line of cars and buses moved, as if he were pulling the traffic along with an invisible chain.